In this third and final post of this series on the similarities between software and music, we’re going to focus on something many of us end up doing whether we intend to or not: Teaching. And it’s an important one because it takes the collective topics of my prior posts, learning to play and finding your own voice as a composer, and provides a means of ensuring that your skills and knowledge endure.

Sharing Experience for Fun and Profit
Teaching percussion students in college helped pay for my groceries and rent. At the time, I didn’t teach out of any sense of altruistic vocation – I needed the money, pure and simple. I charged $12 a half hour, $20 for a full hour and sought to cover rudiments, drum kit and a brief listening exercise at the end. My half hour students generally missed out that the last part, but I felt it was really important to teach students how to be active listeners of music. Otherwise, all music becomes just like watching TV or that crap they play in elevators.

As I said, I was teaching more for the extra money than anything else back then, but honestly, it made me feel good as well. There is something inherently satisfying about taking something you know and passing it along to someone else, seeing the light bulb go on over their head when they suddenly “get it.”

Teaching can also be an experience where you have a realization about how much you really know about a certain topic. We all walk around each day with the sum total of our life’s knowledge and experience in our heads, almost always taking it for granted. If it’s familiar to us, then we assume its common knowledge for everyone else as well. Passing it along to someone willing to learn it helps you put what you know, and perhaps more importantly, what you don’t know, in better perspective.

Of course, the financial rewards of teaching music are proportional to the skill, experience and reputation of the teacher. Several months back, I was looking through the classified ads in the back of Modern Drummer and saw an ad for a lesson with the legendary Joe Morello, former drummer of the Dave Brubeck Quartet. While the ad didn’t mention the price, I heard legendary clinician Dom Famularo tell his story about his first lesson with Joe and the number he threw out was two hundred dollars an hour. Oh yeah, and he’s in New York, so unless you live there already, you’ll need to travel. For many of you, $200 an hour might seem excessive for one one-hour drum lesson, but think of what you could learn in that one hour from a guy who can do this:

Joe can charge that rate because he’s not just teaching what he learned in a book somewhere. He has the real world playing experience combined with expert knowledge and skill of the technique required to master the instrument (if “mastering” is ever really possible).

Also, as Joe points out in one of his many instructional videos, he teaches to pass a piece of himself and his collective experience along to the next generation, essentially creating his own legacy through the drummers he teaches.

Architect as Mentor
Software architects, whether official or unofficial in title, are generally considered the thought leaders of any particular development organization. As I mentioned in my last post, I consider the best architects to be the ones who spent years down in the trenches writing, testing and deploying real applications.

While architects are expected to play many roles, often prioritized by the organizations to which he or she belongs, the role of mentor should be considered one of the most important. Stop for a moment and think about architects you may work with today. Beyond working on application and system design, how much time do they devote to working with developers, helping them solve difficult problems, providing guidance and setting direction? If your answer is, “None,” then you may have the wrong people in those positions.

The best architects will have a great deal of technical and organizational experience that will be of great value to the development teams and organizations they serve. Beyond simply providing technical guidance, they can often help avoid political and deployment barriers which often plague projects, expand timelines and increase costs. By serving as an active mentor, they pass this important information along to the next generation of senior developers and architects.

And on that point, I should be clear:  While focus here is on architects, the role of mentor is by no means limited to just architects. Along my career path, I’ve run into several outstanding developers who, because of their generosity with their time, helped me and many others become better software developers.

So there you have it. As Darth Vader once said, “The circle is now complete.” (Of course, he said that to Obi-Wan Kenobi, his former mentor.) Are there other avenues of similarity we could follow here? Certainly, but I think this post finishes out the three most important similarities between being a musician and a software developer/architect: Learn your technique, learn to play and create new music and pass on what you’ve learned to the next generation.

I’ve gotten some really great feedback on this series and welcome your comments. Please share them with me and keep the conversation going.